Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There | Reprint Edition

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If you want to know where you are, you need a good clock. This surprising connection between time and place has been true for centuries and is now being explored in Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, the companion book to the National Air and Space Museum exhibition of the same name. This beautifully illustrated book covers five major topics in navigation history. The first covers the early history of navigation at sea, including the eighteenth-century development of the marine chronometer and solving the problem of measuring longitude. Explorers then turned their sights to the skies; the need to navigate in the air led to the development of bubble sextants and instruments used by Charles Lindbergh as well as the radar technology used during World War II. The space race required new technology for navigating in space, including the atomic clock. The next phase in navigation history was the invention of satellite systems for navigating on the Earth. The book's final major section explores the ubiquity of global navigation systems in day-to-day modern life with GPS devices, smartphones, and other personal electronics. Complete with sidebars about pioneering navigators as well as missteps in technology that led to later navigation advances, Time and Navigation is a comprehensive exploration of the history of navigation technology and its social implications. It helps us understand where we have been and how we got there so that we can understand where we are going.